


Red

by Shulik



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 06:08:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shulik/pseuds/Shulik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things that whisper in the dark. Red eyes, sharp teeth and words that cut you open.</p><p>Sometimes Lydia whispers back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red

There are things that whisper in the dark. Red eyes, sharp teeth and words that cut you open. 

Sometimes Lydia whispers back. 

+

There is blood on her hands, sticky and warm and it smells like copper pennies and meat. 

Lydia walks forward and the moon rises sickly bright above her head. 

It makes the treetops glow and it illuminates Lydia’s path through the woods. 

Peter Hale’s body grows cooler every step that Lydia takes away from it. She thinks that maybe she can still hear his sharp, staccato laugh as she had sliced from his belly to the soft, vulnerable hollow of his throat. 

+

“What have you done?” Scott is staring at her in horror, transparent thoughts that Lydia can clearly track spinning faster and faster, everything written clear as ink on his face. 

He had tasted warm when she kissed him, that time on the field when Jackson had held her heart in his hands, when Allison was still on their side. Scott’s hair had smelled like apples. 

“What needed to be done,” Derek is the one that speaks, voice hollow and low. 

Lydia wants to laugh. 

Derek is sitting in the shadows of the room, misery pulled taut around his shoulders and defeat written in every line of his body. 

“What none of you could do,” Lydia says and it’s almost a song on her tongue, “I did what none of you could do.” 

+

“I was the one that taught Derek how to drive,” Peter had said eight months ago, when they had stood beneath the trees of the Hale preserve. 

In the golden afternoon sun, his hair had been streaked with jolts of fire and for a moment, Lydia had felt that old, forgotten, deeply covered shiver of want and fear. A jolt up her spine. 

“Talia bought the Camaro for my twenty first birthday,” Peter had said, watching Stiles, Isaac and Scott tussle in the leafs, Derek hovering on their periphery. “I got Derek behind the wheel when he turned fourteen, showed him how to drive stick and automatic. Bought him his first bottle of booze.” 

Lydia had turned to him, raised an eyebrow and waited.

“I taught him to drive,” Peter continued and then flashed a bright grin at her, “and he used my car to have sex with Kate Argent before she burned our whole family alive.” 

Lydia grimaced at that. Sometimes, the extent of Derek’s masochistic tendencies was enough to shock even her. 

“Why did he keep driving it after,” she paused, “after everything?”

“I think he kept it around as a sort of reminder,” Peter shrugged, “not to get involved, not to get sucked in by a pretty face… We all know how that worked out, don’t we?” his gaze flashed to Lydia’s throat, to the small heart pendant that Jackson had given her for her fifteenth birthday. 

To the thin line of the scar that Jennifer had left. 

They stayed silent, watching as Stiles eventually pulled Derek in with them, his large muscled frame tumbling awkwardly into Scott who laughed. 

“I’m going to kill you, you know-” Lydia finally said. She had never felt calmer in her life. 

“Yes,” Peter nodded slowly, “I expect you will.” 

+

It’s Stiles who finally gets off his ass enough to help Lydia to the bathroom. He slips on the droplets of Peter’s blood that still drip off Lydia, pool beneath her fingernails and grow heavy in her hair. 

Once upon a time he would have hovered in the doorway, stuttering about Lydia being beautiful despite everything and Lydia would have brushed him off, feeling fond and amused despite herself. 

He doesn’t look at her now, awkwardly takes a stack of towels out the hallway closet, places them, gingerly, carefully on the edge of the sink and steps out. He doesn't turn back. 

Lydia closes the door behind him. 

In the mirror, she is pale and her lips are a brighter red than she usually wears. 

Peter had once told her that he loved this shade on her. 

There are nightlock flowers in her hair, and wolfsbane stems woven into her bra straps. She unzips her dress and it falls off her, sodden and heavy. It makes an unpleasant squelching sound when it lands. 

Her phone skitters out of the pocket and Lydia bends to pick it up. 

It has somehow managed to stay relatively whole and Lydia types in her password with slow, deliberate movements. 

His number is still first on her speed dial and despite the fact that it is now much longer than she has ever had to dial, he still picks up on the second ring. 

“I’m ready,” Lydia says and looks at herself in the mirror. She is pale and the only color she can see is red. Her lips, her hair and Peter’s blood staining her body. 

It will wash off much faster than anything he had ever done to her. 

“I’ll have your ticket at the airport,” Jackson breathes and his voice, even after all these years is enough to make Lydia relax, an incremental inch at a time. “Are you sure Lyd?”

“I think I’ve had enough of California for a while,” Lydia says and licks her lips. 

Peter had still tasted like the boy she had kissed once upon a time, standing in the empty, burned out shell of his house. He had curled his fingers around her waist before Lydia had danced out of his reach, laughing as she told him to follow her into the woods. 

“Ok,” Jackson says and she can almost hear the smile in his voice, see the crinkles around his eyes, “ok, I’m waiting.”


End file.
